![Cretaceous%20Map[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/cretaceous20map1.jpg?quality=83)
From the University of Missouri-Columbia
COLUMBIA, Mo. – For years, scientists have thought that a continental ice sheet formed during the Late Cretaceous Period more than 90 million years ago when the climate was much warmer than it is today. Now, a University of Missouri researcher has found evidence suggesting that no ice sheet formed at this time. This finding could help environmentalists and scientists predict what the earth’s climate will be as carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.
“Currently, carbon dioxide levels are just above 400 parts per million (ppm), up approximately 120 ppm in the last 150 years and rising about 2 ppm each year,” said Ken MacLeod, a professor of geological sciences at MU. “In our study, we found that during the Late Cretaceous Period, when carbon dioxide levels were around 1,000 ppm, there were no continental ice sheets on earth. So, if carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, the earth will be ice-free once the climate comes into balance with the higher levels.”
In his study, MacLeod analyzed the fossilized shells of 90 million-year-old planktic and benthic foraminifera, single-celled organisms about the size of a grain of salt. Measuring the ratios of different isotopes of oxygen and carbon in the fossils gives scientists information about past temperatures and other environmental conditions. The fossils, which were found in Tanzania, showed no evidence of cooling or changes in local water chemistry that would have been expected if a glacial event had occurred during that time period.
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  IMAGE: In the study, MacLeod examined fossils of organisms that lived 90 million years ago. This photo is an image from a Scanning electron microscope of a planktic (left) and benthic…Click here for more information. |
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“We know that the carbon dioxide (CO2) levels are rising currently and are at the highest they have been in millions of years. We have records of how conditions have changed as CO2 levels have risen from 280 to 400 ppm, but I believe it also is important to know what could happen when those levels reach 600 to 1000 ppm,” MacLeod said. “At the rate that carbon dioxide levels are rising, we will reach 600 ppm around the end of this century. At that level of CO2, will ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica be stable? If not, how will their melting affect the planet?”
Previously, many scientists have thought that doubling CO2 levels would cause earth’s temperature to increase as much as 3 degrees Celsius, or approximately 6 degrees Fahrenheit. However, the temperatures MacLeod believes existed in Tanzania 90 million years ago are more consistent with predictions that a doubling of CO2 levels would cause the earth’s temperature could rise an average of 6 degrees Celsius, or approximately 11 degrees Fahrenheit.
“While studying the past can help us predict the future, other challenges with modern warming still exist,” MacLeod said. “The Late Cretaceous climate was very warm, but the earth adjusted as changes occurred over millions of years. We’re seeing the same size changes, but they are happening over a couple of hundred years, maybe 10,000 times faster. How that affects the equation is a big and difficult question.”
MacLeod’s study was published in the October issue of the journal Geology.
This geologist must not really have been studying the Cretaceous Era.
This work reads more like the Meretricious Era.
I think that these people should stop asking questions that they cannot answer.If all there is to back up your view of the way temperatures are going in the next hundred years are computer models then you don’t have any answers .It is not neccesary to have multiple Earths to experiment with if we keep our objectives simple ,it is possible that they misunderstand our real Earth by simulating many false Earths.
phlogiston says:
September 26, 2013 at 2:16 pm
Nice, but misuses “era” for era, period & epoch.
“So, if carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, the earth will be ice-free once the climate comes into balance with the higher levels.”
When the dust settles, what is going to happen to all these disgraced scientists? I wonder if there is going to be some kind of reformation in science like there was in Christianity. Maybe Al Gore will donate all his climate scam profits to charity.
Two comments I would like to make;
1.Quote –
“This finding could help >> environmentalists << and scientists predict what the earth’s climate will be as carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.
environmentalists ?
2. "carbon dioxide levels were 1,000 ppm"
do they realise that the rise in co2 was caused by the high temps, not the other way round?
shakes head
I always thought that the discovery of glendonites in the Bulldog Shale in central South Australia was pretty convincing evidence of glaciation during the Cretaceous in the Eromanga Basin
I found this link just for a start
http://www.abc.net.au/science/ozfossil/ageofreptiles/eromanga/glendonites.htm
Another study throwing a spanner in the science.
Create uncertainty, create more funding.
johnnycrash says:
September 26, 2013 at 3:43 pm
Maybe forgiveness panels a la South Africa for apartheid apparatchiks.
A Crooks says:
September 26, 2013 at 3:57 pm
The drop stones are better evidence of land ice.
Surprised your site doesn’t mention Muttaburrasaurus, star of the small screen, thought by some to migrate seasonally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muttaburrasaurus
Its distant relatives, the Late Cretaceous hadrosaurs of North America, are similarly thought possibly to have migrated back & forth from Alaska to Alberta & Montana.
This execrable paper should have been strangled in its cradle. The author’s actual foram findings could have been presented without the idiotic CO2 genuflection, but then maybe wouldn’t have been worth publishing.
No Ice? We’re doomed! (Or were, at least.)
Would like to see a discussion about what makes CO2 levels decrease by large amounts–apart from solution in cooling seas. If the K4 boundary was truly a catistrophic impact event that exterminated the dinosaurs along with much else and did it with an extreme winter effect on the vegetation, what caused CO2 levels to subsequently decrease and not increase?
The Franklin Expedition perished in these waters. One wonders how they even contemplated that such a forcing was possible. With a paucity of records they can only have submitted to folk memory, a suggestion that our ancestors had knowledge of an ice free period. We therefore do not have to refer back to pre-history to validate our stance on the enigma of solid state planet. While the Guardian newspaper calls for scientific leadership on the AGW debate we have seen a tendency for the urgency of corroboration as opposed to scrutiny of the fundamentals. Idle science is more likely to attribute that bit where “the dragons be” to AGW because of slack practice, the fear of being ostracised, loss of income through none conformity and a desire to prove a thesis rather than challenge it; we have the phlogiston conceptualisation all over again. There is a romantic interloper dominating incisive thought; when the public broadcaster in Britain determines that AGW is an un-opposable reality and refuses to consider any other scenario we are drawn to the conclusion that AGW may be little other than a situation where romance and temper, the communication of science to the mass, the necessity for drama and urgency, the idea of popular heroes and their dauntless heroism pertain rather than boring old facts and dull toil. AGW becomes a literary work, a novel where whatever has gone before can be sacrificed to the denouement, the coercion of a tale or fable to fit popular mythology and the romantic inclinations not of a hard nose scientific community but a literary, wordy, passionate sensitivity that has little time for data, time, analysis and self-absorption. The story of climate has been turned into Beowulf with all its dramatic turns, it monsters and heroes and it is a thing which science has to pander to or stand the chance of not being heard (it is already showing signs of terminal conformity and loss of rigour). The communication industry has attached to the debate in such a way that it can editorialise any factors that do not agree with its building of tension and its articulation of passion. Science becomes a middle-ground, middle-brow occupation that reflects the accretion of political thought to the centre where to blacken, question, dismantle or defect is seen as socially unacceptable in a value system that knows what it likes and dislikes and sets the agenda to reflect such environments. The enemy becomes the minority. The centre has to be right! In this way it spoon feeds a constituency that is forcing science to be compliant whereas science should be sceptical by nature and able to refute sentiment.
We must get rid of the Carboniferous
Bill Illis (26 Sept 2013 11:15 AM):
The link aside, can you supply the original reference, or verify that these are the original references?
I’m not disagreeing with you or the data. I would prefer to look at the original if possible. If one is going to cite what is shown, it is helpful to be able to cite the original.
Thanks,
Mark H.
“Measuring the ratios of different isotopes of oxygen and carbon in the fossils gives scientists information about past temperatures and other environmental conditions.”
Oxygen isotopes present in the water at the time of biomineralization do not necessarily mean the same isotopes will be present in the shell. The biomineralization process is more complex than that.
Oxygen isotopes present in shells could be part of the fossilization process. But how much and how long did fossilization take?
There are about 250,000 species of known forams, and the new claims for their usefulness in dating sediment is far fetched, since the assumptions of an evolutionary/time relationship between so many species is just assumed in a layered sediment sample.
“COLUMBIA, Mo. – For years, scientists have thought that a continental ice sheet formed during the Late Cretaceous Period more than 90 million years ago when the climate was much warmer than it is today. Now, a University of Missouri researcher has found evidence suggesting that no ice sheet formed at this time. This finding could help environmentalists and scientists predict what the earth’s climate will be as carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.”
Obviously they have had a structured revolution and a little paradigm shift in geology. It looks to be quite fruitful for them already! New dates, new evidence, new drivers, disappeared ice caps, all in one fruitful structured swell foop.
For an another view of the late Cretaceous world climate see the following British Geological Survey article in Earthwise by Ian Wilkinson and Jim Riding (2007) The Cretaceous greenhouse world, Earthwise Issue 24, 32-33.
Fun with geology and climate at the PaleoMap Project at: http://www.scotese.com/Default.htm
The statement that because there was no ice in the late cretaceous at a time when there was 1000ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means that WHENEVER there is 1000ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, then no ice can be present, does to me seem a slightly dubious sleight of hand.
If the consequence of warming oceans and air temperatures was the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, that is one thing. Injected carbon dioxide into the air at another, fixed temperature, does not necessarily recreate the original cretaceous conditions, does it??